Lost

“Cloud Atlas” and “This Must Be the Place.”

The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer direct an adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel.Credit Illustration by Brendan Monroe

Trying to describe “Cloud Atlas” is like trying to read an atlas in the middle of a cloud. The film, adapted from the novel by David Mitchell, runs for two hours and fifty-two minutes. The estimated budget was a hundred million dollars. There are six separate plots, although I could swear I counted a couple more, plus three directors: Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, and her brother, Andy Wachowski. Each of the leading players takes multiple roles; now is your chance, for example, to learn what Hugh Grant looks like as a wattled Cockney with dirty-blond curls, or as a slavering cannibal with a luridly painted face. If the Wachowskis had made “Notting Hill,” Julia Roberts wouldn’t have been Grant’s girlfriend. She would have been his lunch.

Here is your choice of fables. In the mid-nineteenth century, on a voyage through the Pacific Islands, a young American (Jim Sturgess) falls afoul of a scheming doctor (Tom Hanks) but is saved by the efforts of a stowaway slave (David Gyasi). In the nineteen-thirties, an English youth (Ben Whishaw), on a musical quest, is hired as an amanuensis to a crotchety composer (Jim Broadbent). Almost forty years later, in San Francisco, an investigative reporter (Halle Berry), tipped off by an elderly scientist, uncovers the truth about a nuclear power plant and tumbles into danger as a result. In the present day, an unscrupulous London publisher (Broadbent) is confined to an old-people’s home by his brother (Grant). In Neo-Seoul, a glittering Asian city of 2144, a female fabricant (Doona Bae)—cloned to work in the food industry—rises up against the system that bred her. And last, in an age to come—“106 winters after the Fall”—the members of a forest tribe, surviving in primitive conditions, are visited by their streamlined superiors, who zip across the ocean in a kind of aqua-spacecraft.

If your first instinct is to note how that smooth vessel echoes the creaking, masted ship of the earliest tale, then “Cloud Atlas” could be the film that you desire. Its fans, I suspect, will consume the movie time and again, in order to relish the bountiful links in which it delights. The manuscript that the modern publisher reads on a train journey, for instance, is subtitled “A Luisa Rey Mystery,” Luisa Rey being the name of the California reporter. She had a friend in her apartment building, an inquisitive kid, who, we realize, has grown up to be a writer of mysteries, taking her name for his heroine. As for the nuclear whistle-blower who assists her, we first saw him, decades before, in bed with the young musician. And so on, ad infinitum—or ad nauseam, if, like the publisher, you have no taste for “tricksy gimmicks.” This narrative nesting is not the filmmakers’ idea but Mitchell’s. On the page, though, his story lines follow one another in chronological order, whereas in the movie they are tossed and tangled like noodles, the plan being that our interest should not linger, let alone relax, in any zone of history for too long. The same goes for tone. We hop from the farcical whimsy of old folks, as they bust out of the retirement home, to the severe and glittering saga of Neo-Seoul, which is constructed as an Orwellian satire on corporate conformism, but which—as with the Wachowskis’ work on the “Matrix” franchise—becomes laughably oppressive in its insistence that every character must, under all circumstances, retain a poker face.

This is especially tough on poor Jim Sturgess, whose eyes and features have been remolded in a bid to make him look more Asian. (He plays a noble soul named Hae-Joo Chang.) That didn’t work when Sean Connery tried it, in “You Only Live Twice,” and it sure as hell doesn’t work here, inching beyond embarrassment into insult. Such is the price you pay, I suppose, if, like Tykwer and the Wachowskis, you require your actors to roam across continents and centuries—covering Hanks in scars and tattoos at the beginning, where he plays a gnarled old shaman from the distant future, then decking him out with a gold chain and a badly tarnished accent for the part of a scabrous Irish writer, who shoves a snotty critic off a balcony. (We can all approve of that.) Some of these morphings are fun. If you were scared of Hugo Weaving as the fissile villain in “The Matrix,” when he fanned himself out like a deck of cards, get a load of him in “Cloud Atlas,” where he proves to be hardly less daunting in drag, as a fearsome and bosomy nurse. The problem with these transformations, however boldly conceived and eagerly played, is that they cannot help drawing attention to themselves. When I saw the film, the audience clapped during the final credits, as brief clips revealed incarnations—Broadbent in the background, say, clad in white sci-fi robes—that we hadn’t even noticed. So warm a response is wondrous to hear, and the best thing about “Cloud Atlas” is that it could, and should, turn into a properly divisive film, touching off feuds between the fervid and the splenetic, but one has to ask: does it allow for immersion? Even as we applaud the dramatic machinery, are we being kept emotionally at bay?

One answer is to watch “Cloud Atlas” and then try Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” another new release in which an actor is forced to proliferate—becoming a beggarly crone, then a protective father berating his daughter, then a dying man making his peace with a tearful relative (a sequence directly stolen, by the way, from Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady”), and so forth. I was stirred beyond reason by Carax’s notion that we might invest ourselves, plunging up to the hilt, in all that life and death demand of us, even though—or precisely because—we must feign those very feelings and move on. Such are the rules of the game. But “Cloud Atlas” refuses to acknowledge that it is a game. The directors are quite earnest about the appearance and reappearance of their various stars, inviting us to have genuine faith in the blah of eternal recurrence, and there is something grindingly circular in a film that exerts immense—and, to be fair, often spectacular—energy to connect human beings across space and time, only to conclude with the startling news that we are all connected. This takes its toll on the performers. In the musical section, Ben Whishaw somehow conspires with the ever-reliable Broadbent, amid the cacophony of the narrative, to find a welcome stillness and poise, yet even the two of them must bow before the movie’s grand design, and proclaim its raison d’être: one speaks to the other of “meeting again and again in different lives, and in different ages.” Well, I never.

At the heart of a good Paolo Sorrentino film sits a particular sort of man. He tends to be middle-aged or older, and less than orthodox in his habits or appearance. Whatever company he keeps, an air of perpetual solitude surrounds him. The ordinary businessman in “The Consequences of Love” (2004) took heroin on the quiet, and died silently while being lowered into cement. The hero of “The Family Friend” (2006) was a miser with an ape’s jaw, who lived with his mother. “Il Divo” (2008) was about Giulio Andreotti, many times the Prime Minister of Italy, and no more scrutable than a Pope. And now we have Cheyenne (Sean Penn), in “This Must Be the Place,” who inhabits a Dublin mansion and speaks like Marilyn Monroe on Valium. Long ago, he was a rock star, of the goth persuasion, and he still looks the part: red lipstick, aimless shuffle, and a hair style that could be mistaken for an exploding crow.

Indeed, so richly accoutred is the character, and so attentive to nuance is Penn’s every move, that Cheyenne smothers the film. Previously, Sorrentino has stood back and coolly inspected his creations, yet now he seems in awe, and the movie invites us, rather too pleadingly, to lend Cheyenne not just our pity but our love. “This Must Be the Place” is dazzling to behold, not least when our hero leaves Ireland—and his cheerful wife, Jane (Frances McDormand)—for a trip to the United States, where his estranged father has died. The images that emblazon the screen from here on, with skies so blue that they make your eyeballs ache, tell of a soul opened up to raw experience. Cheyenne takes to the road like Humbert Humbert, and he paints his toenails as carefully as Lolita did. The result, however, feels addicted to American strangeness, constantly captured in goggling wide-angle shots, without following Nabokov’s lead and reckoning on American normality. As for the plot, we learn that Cheyenne is Jewish, he learns that his father’s persecutor from Auschwitz may still be alive, and the trembling goth is transformed into a pistol-packing Nazi-hunter. Even if you try to bend all that beneath the movie’s overarching theme of humiliation, past and present, it still feels like a terrible fit. Best to lay it aside, perhaps, and concentrate on the flashing joys and magic sounds that Sorrentino provides—starting with the title, which he borrowed from a Talking Heads song. At one point, David Byrne shows up and sings it to Sean Penn. Of course he does. What did you expect? ♦